page_title: Herbert Hope Risley
section_title: Ethnographic Survey of Bengal: 1885–91
hierarchical_section_title: Herbert Hope Risley / Ethnographic Survey of Bengal: 1885–91
caption_attribution_description: English: The nasal index: a method of classifying ethnicity based on the ratio of the breadth of a nose to its height. Developed by the French anthropologist/anthropometrist, Paul Topinard (1830-1911). He believed that "narrow" noses (Types 1 - 5) indicated European origin; "medium" noses (Type 6) were the "yellow races"; and "broad" were either African (Type 7) or Melanesian and Australian aboriginal (Type 8).
context_page_description: Sir Herbert Hope Risley KCIE CSI was a British ethnographer and colonial administrator, a member of the Indian Civil Service who conducted extensive studies on the tribes and castes of the Bengal Presidency. He is notable for the formal application of the caste system to the entire Hindu population of British India in the 1901 census, of which he was in charge. As an exponent of scientific racism, he used the ratio of the width of a nose to its height to divide Indians into Aryan and Dravidian races, as well as seven castes.
  Risley was born in Buckinghamshire, England, in 1851 and attended New College, Oxford University prior to joining the Indian Civil Service. He was initially posted to Bengal, where his professional duties engaged him in statistical and ethnographic research, and he soon developed an interest in anthropology. His decision to indulge these interests curtailed his initial rapid advancement through the ranks of the Service, although he was later appointed Census Commissioner and, shortly before his death in 1911, became Permanent Secretary at the India Office in London.
context_section_description: In 1885, Risley was appointed to conduct a project titled the Ethnographic Survey of Bengal, which Augustus Rivers Thompson, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Presidency at the time, believed to be a sensible exercise. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 had come close to overturning British rule in India, and the disruption led the British government to take over administrative control from the British East India Company. Members of the ICS such as Richard Carnac Temple thought that if further discontent were to be avoided, it was necessary to obtain a better understanding of the colonial subjects, particularly those from the rural areas. As time went on, the ethnographic studies and their resultant categorisations were embodied in numerous official publications and became an essential part of the British administrative mechanism; of those categorisations it was caste that was regarded to be, in Risley's words, "the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian society". The desire for ethnographic studies was expressed by another Raj administrator, Denzil Ibbetson, in his 1883 report on the 1881 census of Punjab: 
  Our ignorance of the customs and beliefs of the people among whom we dwell is surely in some respects a reproach to us; for not only does that ignorance deprive European science of material which it greatly needs, but it also involves a distinct loss of administrative power to ourselves.
  Risley's survey task was aided when research papers of a recently deceased Indian Medical Service doctor, James Wise, were given to him by the doctor's widow. Wise had researched the people of Eastern Bengal and it was agreed that, after ascertaining the accuracy of his work, his research should be incorporated into Risley's survey results. In return, those volumes of the survey dealing with ethnographic matters would be dedicated to Wise. Further assistance came from the research of Edward Tuite Dalton into the jungle tribes of Chhotanagpur and Assam. Dalton, like Wise, had previously published his efforts but now they would be integrated as a part of a larger whole. Risley was able to deal with the remaining areas of Bengal by making use of a large staff of correspondents who came from disparate backgrounds, such as missionaries, native people and Government officials.
  
  In 1891 Risley published a paper entitled The Study of Ethnology in India. It was a contribution to what Thomas Trautmann, a historian who has studied Indian society, describes as "the racial theory of Indian civilisation". Trautmann considers Risley, along with the philologist Max Müller, to have been leading proponents of this idea which 
  by century's end had become a settled fact, that the constitutive event for Indian civilisation, the Big Bang through which it came into being, was the clash between invading, fair-skinned, civilized Sanskrit-speaking Aryans and dark-skinned, barbarous aborigines.
   Trautmann notes, however, that the convergence of their theories was not a deliberate collaboration.
  In the same year, 1891, the four volumes of The Tribes and Castes of Bengal were published. These contained the results of the Bengal survey, with two volumes comprising an "Ethnographical Glossary", and a further two being of "Anthropometric Data". Risley took advice from William Henry Flower, Director of the Natural History Museum, and William Turner, an Edinburgh anthropologist, in compiling the anthropometric volumes. The work was well received by the public and government alike. In the same year, he was elected an officier of the Académie Française; and on 1 January 1892 he was vested as a Companion of the Indian Empire (CIE). In more recent times, his use of contemporary anthropometric methods has led to his career being described by Bates as "the apotheosis of pseudo-scientific racism", an opinion that is shared by others. The theory now known as scientific racism was prevalent for a century from around the 1840s and had at its heart, says Philip D. Curtin, that "race was one of the principal determinants of attitudes, endowments, capabilities and inherent 
caption: The nasal index: a method of classifying ethnicity based on the ratio of the breadth of a nose to its height, Developed by Paul Topinard. "Narrow" noses (Types 1 – 5) indicate European origin;  "medium" noses (Type 6) are the "yellow races"; and "broad" are either African (Type 7) or Melanesian and Australian aboriginal (Type 8).
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